


Lessons from Margot

by postmortemtsarina



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, alana-centric, depression and anxiety, i planned for this to be longer but this short rewrite resonated way better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-21 21:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7405276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postmortemtsarina/pseuds/postmortemtsarina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alana spends a lot of time captive within her mind. Margot is her rock, though, and she knows she will not sink. As long as the dead stay dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lessons from Margot

**Author's Note:**

> Ah I originally had a 1500+ word draft but I cut out 90% of the purple prose (and yet I still think I may have too much) and put more emphasis on how much Margot and Alana love each other and their son. I think this shorter version works way better so hopefully you all like it!

Once the news reached her and the media flayed and rehashed their relationship for weeks, Alana wanted Will and Hannibal to be dead. It was a balance that could not be maintained. Without Will, Hannibal would be on the warpath and she had no doubt that she was among the first on the list. Without Hannibal, Will…

…Whatever would become of Will could he have survived the plunge from the cliff face would not be good.  

These thoughts rattled in her mind as she lay in bed one night, perhaps a month later (time was fluid through her mind and fingers these days, a symptom of anxiety) as she considered returning to America. The thought shriveled away instantly when she thought about the positively salivating journalists awaiting her. Thanks to Lounds and Chilton, her long-dead romantic involvement with Hannibal and Will’s tragic crush on her made her a prime target for speculation. She had already seen tabloids in markets and crumpled up on the streets that debated her sexuality and the identity of Morgan’s “father”.

Margot told her not to let it get to her, that the plague that was attention would weaken and get easier to bear as she got used to being the wife of a Verger. Negative press wasn’t anything new to Margot who one blessed, drunken night confessed bubbly and pink with rum that she had been particularly wild during her teens… before Daddy and Mason all but muzzled her. For Alana, however, the flame of indignant anger and anxiety could not be soothed with just kisses and windows rolled in the face of paparazzi. She wanted to scream at the vultures of the world to stop involving her in this mess, stop exposing her family to obsessed true crime fans. Let her bury the veils of the memories of the men she thought she knew and love her wife. Let her son grow up without his mothers’ ghosts trailing behind him like tangled puppets. His older brother died in that sow’s womb. Cordell was dead. Mason was dead. The Dragon was dead.

Hannibal was dead.

Will was dead.

Her family was alive.

But she was trapped in limbo.

Margot certainly noticed, as while Alana spoke of her desire for intimacy, their sex life had suffered. They spent the most time together when they were had Morgan, squealing and sweet, between them as they watched movies and went on daytime adventures. Their marriage was ironclad, after all they had been through not even dead men could truly tear them apart, but Alana’s mental health had her a slave to her work and shutting down whenever anything about the “Murder Husbands” entered her bubble. She had it slipped to her like a poison once, at a gala while Margot fetched them champagne, that there had been footage recovered from Francis Dolarhyde’s setup at the cliff, that perhaps it would be therapeutic for her to interpret the allegedly distorted and myopic clip of the fight and fall for “That Crawford Man” at the BAU, to really confirm if Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter were dead or not. There was power in using their full names and this faceless swine knew it as he sought to see her squirm in her peach dress and golden jewelry. She snapped that her psychiatric expertise did not extend to poorly recorded body language and rumors and clicked away, thinking of feeding the man a live and wrathful eel. She remained at the event, alive with fury but dwindled down to embers and silent tears in Margot’s arm and the heated car.

Margot was a brilliant woman, and seemed to know just how to treat Alana as she drifted along the road to recovery. Alana felt pinpricks of guilt as she knew why Margot understood her captivity within her own body. The balance in their relationship teetered and tottered as she alternated between wanting to reach out and not wanting to seem weak or god forbid, miscommunicate that she still loved Will more than as an old friend. Margot had told her one night that she didn’t care even if that was the case. She knew that Alana loved her as well, and loved her more. She shared Alana’s hopes that Will and Hannibal were dead and reflected it as her opinion. Alana was not going to run off with a dead man just because she was bisexual. It was a shitty stereotype and completely insensitive to the delicate but complicated and all-consuming black hole that was the story of Will and Hannibal. The _finished_ story.

When the moon was blinding in the sky on black and cloudless nights however, Alana did still wonder.

Below her drive to forget the bloody drama and her guilt and her love, she feared that within the dark depths of the ocean, deep as the night sky was high above the earth, inky black skeletons with twisting antlers entwined within each other waited and waited, smoldering in vengeance and some horrible funhouse reflection of affection for one another. When they finally gathered the strength to pierce the glassy tides, they would be ravenous.


End file.
